


Coping Mechanisms

by SeeEmRunning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Eating Disorder, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Preseries, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeEmRunning/pseuds/SeeEmRunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series. Everything blurs together, after a while: schools, towns, hunts, emotions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

> Wow. Heavy on the angst. And two stories posted back-to-back - can you tell I'm trying to clear out my backlog of 'completed-but-not-yet-posted'?

"Here we are, Sammy!" seventeen-year-old Dean Winchester said far too cheerfully, pulling the Impala to a stop in front of yet another nondescript apartment complex in the bad part of town. Not that Sam actually knew what town they were in; he'd given up on learning the names six months and eight moves ago.

"It's Sam," he grumbled back, scowling. 'Sammy' was an idiotic nickname for dogs and little kids, and at thirteen, Sam was neither.

"What crawled up your ass and died?" Dean asked, still cheerful.

"The roaches from the last motel," Sam shot back, smiling to take the sting out of his words. Even if he meant them, he didn't want Dean to be pissed.

Dean took the bait and laughed. "Yeah, that place was a shithole. C'mon, let's get unpacked. I'll get you registered for school tomorrow."

"So we're going to be here for a while?" Sam asked hopefully.

Dean frowned. "Month or two, I think. Depends. You know how it is."

"Yeah," Sam mumbled, undoing his seatbelt. "I know."  
***  
"Up and at 'em, Sammy boy!" Dean was manically cheerful again. Sam knew it was an act.

Sam groaned. "I'm up." He threw his pillow at his older brother and rubbed his gritty eyes. "You're too damn happy for five in the morning."

"You're too damn grumpy for five in the morning," Dean crowed. "Come on, we'll start with a run."

Sam didn't respond, choosing instead to pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt that might have once been white. He slept in his boxers solely to cut down on things he had to fuss with so early in the morning.

They passed their father as they traipsed through the kitchen. "Morning, boys," he said casually, scanning the newspaper and nursing a cup of black coffee. "Out for a run?"

"Yeah," Dean said. Sam smothered a yawn.

"Don't be too long," their father ordered.

"Will do." Dean pushed Sam out the door. "C'mon, bitch. Stretch out the sticks you call legs."

"You're just jea-jealous, jerk," Sam said back, the snark ruined a bit by the yawn that interrupted him partway through. "I'm gonna be taller than you soon."

"Keep telling yourself that." Dean bent his leg and grabbed the top of his foot, and Sam followed suit. Ten minutes later, they took off in an easy jog. It was their normal morning routine. On the first day they spent in a new town, it served a purpose other than exercise: it let them learn their way around before the place was crowded with people and cars.

Dean led them down the neighborhood streets, working off the map he'd memorized the night before. Sam wiped sweat off his head as they pounded the pavement and tried not to think about ten years of following his father from town to town and his brother from street to street with no say about any of it.

When they got back to the house, Dean called first shower. Sam wandered into the kitchen for water and coffee.

"Good run?" his dad asked absently.

"Yeah," Sam answered, filling the glass and sipping. "Why are we here?"

Sam knew the instant the words were out of his mouth and his father's eyes narrowed he should've phrased it better. "I mean," he corrected himself hastily, "what are we hunting?"

His father relaxed minutely. "Werewolf. Been going on for three months now. Next full moon's in three weeks."

Sam nodded, rinsed the glass, and pulled down a mug to fill with coffee. "Any idea who?"

"Not yet. I'll do that while you're in school today."

"Talking about the case?" Dean always showered fast. "Better get going, still gotta get you registered."

Sam nodded again and left the kitchen. With any luck, Dean wouldn't think to ask if he'd eaten anything when he came out.  
***  
They moved again, and again. School in Town X was the same as school in Town Y was the same as school in Town Z. Nothing ever changed. There were the overly-cheerful guidance counselors, the blustery principals, the determinedly above-petty-teenagers teachers. There were the snotty jocks, the quiet geeks, a mass of indistinguishable flesh in blues and reds and yellows packing the hallway. There was the hazing of the new kid, the 'say something about yourself!' teachers seemed to get off on, the too-nice girl who asked him to sit with her friends. There was English and history and chemistry - Sam had gotten pieces of biology, chemistry, Earth science, and physics, but had yet to complete a single one of the courses. There was math, calculus or geometry or algebra. There was gym, usually running and dodgeball because the teacher didn't care enough to do anything more difficult.

There was the smell of sweaty teenager and too much deodorant in the halls. The vaguely lemon-scented soap in the bathrooms. The dingy walls of an institution holding hundreds of bored teenagers for seven hours a day. The lockers with crappy locks that anyone could get into with a well-placed kick. The uncomfortable desks.

The towns changed, but the schools didn't. Sam stopped caring so much. He stopped turning in assignments - they'd be gone in two weeks anyway, what did it matter? He stopped making friends - they'd be gone in two weeks anyway, why put himself through the hurt? He stopped paying attention in class - his life was moving and hunting, dead languages and deader monsters, why should knowing how to write an essay help him? He stopped putting energy into more than the bare minimum for school - really, what was the point of completing the square for partial fraction decomposition?

When he was younger, ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen years old, Sam would keep count. Eight seven six five four years to go until he could leave, until he could go to college, until he could get away from the nightmare that was decapitations and grave desecrations and sharpening silver knives and not knowing day to day if his father and brother would be there breathing when he woke up in the morning. When he was fourteen, the counting grew rarer. When he was fifteen and his girlfriend turned out to be a brain-eating monster, it stopped altogether.

He was never getting out.

He was going to live as a hunter, as a killer, as a fraudster and a thief. His dreams of college went up in flames the first time he, as a sophomore in high school, mentioned going to school and hunting on weekends and kicked off a fight. Sam and his father barely spoke for a month.

Sam learned his lesson. He may not have been born to be a hunter like Dean was, but he was going to die as one, and the knowledge poisoned him from the inside out. He never mentioned college again, tried to forget it had ever crossed his mind.

Dean noticed him withdrawing. As close as they were, it would have taken more than a different girl every night for Dean to miss Sam shutting down. Dean tried, in turns, screaming at him, insulting him, begging him _please just talk to me, Sam, tell me what's wrong, please, you're miserable, let me help_. Nothing broke through because there was nothing left of the Sam Dean had once known. He was a shell, a robot, running and sparring and filling a seat in school. When Dad floated the idea of Sam dropping out, Dean fought against it harder than Sam did. Dean won.

Sam thrived on numbness. He glutted himself on the feeling of emptiness. _Wake up, survive, go to bed, repeat_ became his mantra. He took it day by day, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute if he needed to. It was harder than he'd thought it would be, pretending normal when there were days he could barely force himself out of bed. He was consumed with a dark gray fog and the only clear things were the weapons he cleaned and sharpened daily. Before he'd only worked on weapon maintenance when he was ordered. Now he did the tasks with something approaching relief. He caught himself wondering, over and over, what waited for him when he was dead. Did suicides go to Hell, as the Bible claimed? Or did God understand that nobody could live like this and extend compassion? What about ambivalence deaths? If he didn't watch out for himself on a hunt, was that a suicide or a murder?

When a wendigo tossed him into a tree, his arm ended up with a compound fracture, a jagged piece of bone sticking through the skin and trailing bright red down his pale, dirt-smeared forearm. Sam could breathe again, for the first time in years, could breathe despite the thick smoke ( _one of them must have lit it on fire while I was distracted_ ) and the disappointment that the damn thing didn't finish the job.

"Sam!" Dean yelled, dropping beside him on the forest floor and starting to pat him down for injuries.

"Hey, Dean," Sam managed, painting a smile on. "You okay?"

"I'm not the one who got thrown into a tree. How are you?"

"My arm's busted." Sam lifted it a little before giving it up as a hopeless exercise. "How's Dad?"

"Making sure the woods don't burn around us."

"Okay, so how is he?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "He's fine. He's always fine."

"And you're not hurt?" Sam shifted.

"No, Sam, I'm not - Jesus, your arm!" Dean had finally finished his pat-down and focused on the arm Sam had been holding close to his side.

"Told you it was busted."

"You didn't tell me there was bone sticking out. That's disgusting, dude." Dean snorted, but there was a look of horror in his eyes.

"Least it doesn't hurt too bad," Sam said. "Gonna need a hospital for this one, though."

"Yeah. We are. Come on, bitch. Dad can catch up later."  
***  
Sam was on his own again. His arm had healed, but whatever they were after had a thing for under-sixteen boys, so Sam had been left behind. 

Sam _hated_ being left behind. It reminded him too much of being younger and not knowing if his family would still be together in the morning, or if he'd need to stitch up a wound in his father's body, or if he'd need to wrap Dean's ribs because they were cracked. It gave him too much time to think, and thinking had become Sam's enemy.

He found himself standing over the weapons bag, skin feeling three sizes too small. Emotions he couldn't name coiled beneath the surface, making a hollow cavern of nerves and organs trapped beneath his sternum. He needed something, some release, some way to make it go away, because he was scaring himself. If Dean had been home, Sam would have gone to him. Hell, Sam would have gone to their father and just hugged him, because as much as their father sucked at the emotional stuff and at keeping his temper, he'd never turned his sons away when they needed him.

But he was alone, and he was desperate, and he kept seeing the bright red on his arm when he'd been tossed into that tree.

He forced himself away from the bag, dimly aware that this was a line he shouldn't cross even if he couldn't name why. There were other ways to find release.

Sam tried them all over the next month. He tried journaling, but the words just made him feel worse for complaining. He tried to lose himself in girls and his own palm, but he couldn't force himself to be interested enough for that to work. He tried other, smaller things - rubber band against the wrist (not enough), biting himself until he bruised (and Dean made fun of him for screwing a girl who left hickeys on his arms), taking his frustrations out during sparring (but the one time he tried he almost started sobbing in Dean's arms, and that wouldn't do, Dean couldn't know any more than he already did).

Sam stopped sleeping well. Bruises appeared under his eyes, deep circles that washed out his face and made him look gray. It didn't matter when he went to bed or how exhausted he was; he couldn’t fall asleep before three in the morning and he never slept past six.

The January Dean turned twenty, Sam shattered. He'd been broken for years, he knew, but that January he lost hope he could ever be fixed. That January he'd been left behind again, it was a two-person job and Sam had school in the morning, and Sam couldn't force himself away from the weapons bag.

He slipped into the bathroom and locked the door, irrationally afraid his family would come back early. Nothing else had worked. He needed to do something. He raised the blade to his arm - _no. Stop. Too conspicuous._

So where?

Dean saw him with his shirt off all the time; his entire upper half was off-limits. Same for anywhere exposed by shorts. In the end, Sam settled for his inner thighs, suddenly relieved he didn't wear tight jeans.

He climbed into the bathtub - no use getting blood on the floor - and stared at the knife in his hands.

 _So it's come to this,_ he thought viciously, and made a shallow slice.

The way the blood welled, crimson drops on pale skin. The tracks they made down the inside of his leg. The thin lines, red and angry, left behind when the cuts clotted. The pain that dulled his thoughts down to a quiet roar of _not good enough._ The faintly metallic taste in the back of his mouth. The starburst that blanked out his vision with sweet bliss when he cut a little too deep for comfort. The filth that was slipping out of him and puddling below.

The cavern in his chest filled with light and beauty, and Sam could breathe for the first time since the wendigo. 

He savored it for a moment, taking deep breaths because he could, almost laughing from the exhiliration pumping through his filthy, useless veins before he stood up, put the knife on the vanity to wash later, and started the water in the shower. The blood turned the water pink, and Sam was lightheaded. _Not so much next time,_ he thought, startling himself. He hadn't thought that far ahead, but now, feeling better than he had in years, Sam knew that there would be a next time, and a time after that, and that knowledge made him feel lighter than helium.

The feeling lasted until he stepped out of the shower and caught sight of the drying blood on the blade. It was replaced by shame as the full impact of what he'd done hit him. He'd crossed a line. If Dean ever saw - if Dad ever saw - if anyone ever knew - if Sam ever acknowledged how screwed up he was - everything was going to come down, and it was his fault, his fault for needing, his fault for going too far, his fault for not being able to cope with what his family thrived on, his fault for not being okay. His fault, all his fault, his mother dead in his nursery and that was all he knew about her because they blamed him too much to let him know her, his father broken into pieces and making Dean a parent, Dean growing up without a mother, every hit they'd taken, everything their father dished out when he was drunk and angry, all his fault. His fault, everything, and nobody respected him enough to say it to his face.

He took a deep breath, washed the knife, put it back in the hunting bag. He could barely look at the damn thing that had given him such twisted happiness.

That night, as he lay in bed unable to sleep, he took comfort in the knowledge that there were still lines he hadn't crossed. He hadn't gone for the femoral or for a gun, and that was what mattered. He hadn't cut somewhere Dean could see, and Dean was what mattered. He hadn't left evidence anywhere, and that was what mattered.

It never did occur to him that maybe he mattered, too.  
***  
Sam was sixteen when Dean shoved pamphlets into his hand. "Think about it," he was told. By the time he managed to figure out he was looking at college brochures, Dean had already left the motel room of the night, probably to find a bar.

 _Dean doesn't want you,_ a little voice in his head taunted.

 _Shut up,_ he told himself. There had to be a reason Dean had given him the brochures other than him wanting Sam out of his life, but Sam couldn't think of any. _We'll talk when he gets back,_ he told himself, anxiety spiking.

He waited up for Dean, and when the panic got too bad, he calmed himself the only way he knew how. 

Dean was drunk off his ass when he got in, of course he was, and he broke the salt line when he shuffled inside. "All right, Sammy?" he asked with a broad grin a half second before he faceplanted on the bed and started snoring.

Sam scowled, fixed the line, and wrestled his brother's boots off his feet.

It wasn't until the next afternoon that Sam judged Dean to be over his hangover enough to talk. "Dean?" he started cautiously, getting his attention.

"What is it, Sam?"

"Why did you give me those brochures?"

Dean was quiet for a few minutes. "I want more than this for you," he said at last. "Hunting's enough for me. But you're different." _You're wrong_ was unspoken but heard. "This life is killing you."

"Why do you say that?"

Dean laughed mirthlessly. "Sam. You don't smile, I haven't heard you laugh in years, you can barely sleep, you eat the bare minimum and sometimes you can't even keep that down, you haven't dated anyone since you were thirteen, you haven't made any friends in about three years, you don't meet girls, you don't care about school anymore. You sit in the room and clean weapons and read old books and do translations and you don't even fight with Dad anymore." Dean's eyes locked onto his. "This is your way out, Sam."

Sam's lungs constricted painfully. "You don't want me here," he said. "Right, yeah, I thought that was it, sorry, I'll just -"

"Stop, Sam. Sit down." Dean waited until he did. "It's not that I don't want you. If we never went our separate ways, I'd be happy. But you haven't been happy in a long time, and if leaving will make you happy, I won't stop you. I know you were thinking about college before. I thought I'd help."

"Dad's going to be pissed."

"Let him be pissed, then. I don't want this for you."

"What if this is what I want for myself?"

Dean's eyes tightened. "Then I won't stop you. But I'm sure as hell not forcing you into it, either."

It was the validation Sam had been looking for, blessing to make his own choices about his own life, but now that he had it he didn't know what to do with it. "Thanks."

"Chick-flick moment's done. What's on TV?" In true Dean Winchester style, the conversation was ended with a blare of noise.

Sam couldn't leave it alone. "Dean?"

Dean hit the mute button. "What's up?"

"I don't know if I have the grades anymore to get in anywhere."

"Then we'll work on it," Dean said calmly. "You and me. We'll work on it and you'll write a kickass essay and you'll get a full ride somewhere."

"Impossible," Sam said quietly. "The way we live...a new school every three weeks...it just isn't possible."

"We'll make it possible," Dean said fiercely. "We'll stay somewhere steady for a while."

"Dad won't -"

"I'll deal with Dad," Dean interrupted. "Something's gotta change, Sam."

"Why?" he asked. "Dad's happy, you're happy, what's wrong?"

"You're not."

Sam huffed out a laugh. "Two out of three isn't bad. Me happy means you and Dad are miserable."

"Maybe not," Dean said. "Sam…"

"No easy answers, right?" he said quietly. "It's a balancing act. I can do this. You and Dad can't settle."

"I can," Dean said fiercely. "I will do whatever you need -"

"What about what you need?" Sam snapped back.

"I need you happy, and that is all I need."

"What about Dad? What about hunting?" He could see Dean was struggling and softened his voice. "Dean, really. It's okay. I'll think about college, really I will, but we don't have to plan the future tonight."

Dean looked at him, and Sam could tell that he wanted so badly to help. The only problem was that he was beyond help. _Not that he'd help if he knew what you did in the shower,_ he thought viciously.

"Come on, movie's getting to the good part," Sam said quietly, jerking his head at the TV. Dean just nodded and turned the volume back up, but he left his arm extended over the headboard. An invitation.

Sam took it, switching beds to sit next to his older brother and laugh at how inaccurate the werewolf movie was.


End file.
